The Unseen

Here's a good take on the haunted house by poltergeists. Story evolves around Laurel, who just moved to North Carolina to get away from bad breakup. There she is instantly taken with the Rheine Lab and all the experiments that were carried in there during the 60's. She's working there as a teacher and is also expected to publish something for the univeristy. As a possible book publication, she, along with another fellow teacher and 2 "gifted" students, move in an allegedly haunted house by poltergeists in order to recreate the experiments that were performed there decades ago. Story takes a bit to take flight; but once it does, it's pretty gripping. Oh! and creepy too. ( )

I loved the book, creepy enough, I felt chills as I was reading it.
Laurel Macdonald is a psychologist who just experience ESP. In an effort to understand what happens to her. And in the process of starting a new life. She starts researching the experiment of the Rhine Laboratory of the Duke university, which trived for 38 years, to finally close for unknown reason.
With a colleague of hers, she decides to reproduce the last experiment of the Rhine laboratory, without knowing what happenend in the end.

This is my first book of Alexandra Sokoloff, I wasn't sure I'd like it after reading reviews that this wasn't her best work. But since I had nothing to compare it with. I just got caught in the story and devoured the book very quickly! ( )

It took a while to get into this book, and I never really bonded with the characters...to the extent that I frequently forgot the main character's name while reading. There were several storylines that were started and never finished. A lot of loose ends were left, in my opinion. However, the last quarter of the book was great; fast paced, suspenseful, and creepy. ( )

I've been wavering between three or four stars with The Unseen. I've read Alexandra Sokoloff's previous work. I thought The Harrowing was great and I absolutely loved The Price. But something about The Unseen made it not as captivating as the other two.

I love haunted house stories. Always have. There's just so much build up in them and most of the time, it delivers. That was one of my problems with The Unseen. Firstly, it took a long while for anything remotely creepy to happen. Usually I don't mind it since it sets the mood up earlier. But this didn't happen. While it took about a hundred pages for anything to get going, I felt that while the author was building up the characters, the mood just wasn't being set up. There was no eerie sense of foreboding in the first hundred pages.

But when things start to get going, they really got going. The last hundred pages were very intense, though, it wasn't exactly creepy nor scary. Just a bit thrilling. The premise was very intriguing, though. And while I wasn't particularly scared, I was interested enough to keep reading the book. It just fell a little bit flat to me. I would recommend her other books, The Harrowing and The Price, slightly more than this one. ( )

Laurel MacDonald has moved from California to North Carolina to put distance between her and her cheating fiancee. She takes a teaching job at Duke University in NC. Laurel has some paranormal occurrences in her own life and family so information on the Rhine Research Center intrigues her, especially when she finds out their research was shut down after a certain experiment. I was hoping for a little more woo woo when the group decides to stay at the house which precipitated the shut down, maybe an actual ghost that could be seen. But this was more "Blair Witch" in that perhaps the author felt it was more intriguing to keep those aspects in the reader's imagination. ( )